The Vasquez Baby

‘Yes.’ It would have been foolish to pretend that she didn’t know what he was talking about. She stood for a moment, trying to catch her breath, needing to speak and not knowing how to say what needed to be said. ‘I didn’t mean to force your hand. I thought we were good together.’

‘We were.’

‘But—you never would have wanted marriage.’

‘No.’ His face was closed, uncommunicative and she looked at him with mounting frustration.

‘Why? If a relationship is good, marriage just makes it better.’

His laugh hurt more than any harsh words. ‘And we’re a case in point, are we?’

‘Is there anything left between us?’

His answer was to rise to his feet and stride across to her. Without bothering to speak, he closed his fingers around her wrist, pulled her hard against him. ‘How can you ask that, when this thing between us has been choking us since the day we met?’

Without giving her a chance to reply, he brought his mouth down on hers.

As kisses went, this one wasn’t gentle but she didn’t even care. It was an explosion of mutual need, an acknowledgement of the passion and chemistry that kept both of them locked together when external forces might have driven them apart.

Excitement swamped her, her head swam with a rush of dizzying pleasure and she would have slid to the floor if he hadn’t wrapped his arms around her.

They kissed with desperation, their mouths locked together in a furious, reckless urgency that exploded away the flimsy barriers that had been erected between them.

It was only when his hand touched her breast that Faith regained sufficient mental ability to realise what she was doing.

‘We can’t fix problems with sex,’ she groaned, but the erotic skill of his mouth stole the words and her body shivered against his. ‘Raul, this is just too complicated to solve in this way—’

‘Life is complicated,’ he muttered, his lips trailing down the line of her jaw. ‘In real life, people are complicated and they behave in complicated ways.’

‘You didn’t think about my feelings.’

He lifted his head and looked at her. ‘Both of us were guilty of that.’ His return shot scored a direct hit and she stiffened.

‘With hindsight I can see that I should have told you I’d lost the baby, but my reasons for not telling you were unselfish.’ Her stumbled admission received no more response than a raised eyebrow and a careless lift of his shoulders.

‘If there’s one thing that the last few months has proved, it’s that neither of us knows the other as well as we thought.’ His handsome face was grim. ‘That is common. It’s the reason that so many marriages end in divorce. We can change that, Faith. But not if you run.’

She looked at him, torn by indecision, her head full of problems and questions. Logic told her to do one thing, her heart another.

‘If I stay, I won’t let you hurt me again,’ she warned in a voice that shook with emotion. ‘Don’t ever hurt me again.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT FELT strange being back when she’d thought she’d never see the place again.

Faith sat in silence in the back of the limousine as it drove through the ornate iron gates that guarded the entrance of the estancia.

She couldn’t quite believe she was actually here.

What if she was making the biggest mistake of her life by giving their marriage another chance?

She sighed and stared out of the window. Obviously she was just a pushover for a big, arrogant South American male.

But she knew it was more than that.

She loved him and she couldn’t just switch that off.

And she loved Argentina.